I keep my blog as a personal record of what I'm up to, which might be seen as working towards "An elegant sufficiency, content, retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books, ease and alternate labour, useful life". I'm certainly not there yet. There is quite some way to go!

Dec 12 O Christmas tree

We chose our Christmas tree last week and joked with the salesman about being picky about the shape, the colour, the arrangement of the branches and so on.

It’s been out in the garden all week but it was time to bring it inside and begin the decoration.

I referred to a slight meltdown with the lights last year and suffice to say, we didn’t want a repeat performance this time round. Both of us had it in our mind that we needed a new set (several new sets) for our tree this year and when I first spotted them on a supermarket shelf back in October, I bought three 240 bulb sets of “white” lights, thinking they’d do just fine. Yes, we have a big tree!

But yet again, we found ourselves surrounded by wires, transformers, plastic boxes and all manner of different sets of tree lights – including three new boxes bought fresh this year which turned out to be rather bluer in tone than the lights we had already got. Bleh! As we did our best to cobble together enough of the “warm white” lights for the tree from our collection (possibly a contender for the European Christmas Tree Light mountain) I thought back to when I was a child, when I remember my parents using a single set of just twelve lamps for our artificial tree.

I found this photo on ebay and remembered going into Woolworths to choose a couple of colourful new shapes to have as spares. My favourite was a snowman. Over the years we progressed, as did most families I imagine, through 2 sets of 24 multi-coloured fairy lights on a silver tree and on to a similar number of plain white lights on a green tree again, influenced by time spent in Germany.

Here we are now, with brand new sets of 240 LED multi function lights which will perform all kinds of showy tricks but which we leave on “steady on”.

I suppose arranging lights on a Christmas tree is a mindless enough task to allow such reminiscing and thankfully, we managed to avoid total meltdown as we arranged the three new sets of lights and a fourth we had already which seemed to match. Quite how there are 900 lights on that tree, I can’t begin to fathom, but I’m not going to count them! That little set of twelve wouldn’t have gone very far, would it?

A couple of hours later, lights, baubles, ribbons and garlands in place , it’s time to take a photo. The new lights are working just fine and after a bit of slight rearrangement to deal with a couple of dark spots, we think we’ve got it sorted.

Except

I don’t like the colour of these new lights. They are cold, hard white and at night time I feel the need to put an extra layer on just to go near it